19 December 2012 12:36 AM

Alex Salmond says an independent Scottish government could negotiate with Brussels to secure its place in the European Union. Scotland is resource rich, he says: Scotland has oil and fish, so the EU has to give us terms and let us in.

Well, I live in Brussels and I have seen small countries try to negotiate with the elite of this place. All I can say to Mr Salmond is: ‘Good luck with that one.’

The government of an independent Scotland could negotiate all it wants, but there is just one end for any small country in the EU: obedience to the goals of the European project as directed by Germany.

I am an Irish journalist who has covered this project for years. I have seen what the EU has done to Ireland in the name of ‘saving the euro’ and ‘completing the European project.’ The EU has stripped out Ireland’s sovereignty, destroyed its banking system, destroyed its domestic economy and its workforce, compelled its young people to emigrate, taken control of its domestic budgets, and forced £55bn debt onto the shoulders of its citizens which they will never be able to repay.

And through it all, Irish government ministers have been in and out of Brussels to ‘negotiate’ terms with the EU institutions. They might as well have stayed home.

Just last month I waited at the European Council headquarters until 4.30 in the morning for the end of yet another crisis meeting of the eurozone finance ministers. After the meeting broke up, I found the Irish finance minister exhausted and alone in the dark – not an aide, not an advisor, no one with him – outside the VIP entrance to the council.

Some 'VIP'. Nobody had even sent a Merc to fetch him. Despite the dozens of international journalists crowding just a few feet behind us, piling in with microphones and questions for any important minister they could find – the German, the French, or the European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi – no one except me wanted to talk to the Irish minister.

Why should they? He mattered not at all, the negotiating position of his small country mattered not at all. He was not the German, nor the French, nor the ECB.

He was just ‘a peripheral.’

If Mr Salmond negotiates long enough, he will one day join some Irish minister in the pre-dawn Brussels damp, waiting alone and ignored, hoping for a people carrier to turn up eventually to take him to a hotel bed. Meanwhile the European Commissioner for Economics, Monetary Affairs and the Euro will sweep past him in a chauffeur-driven BMW. That is the certain fate of a European Scotland, resource-rich or not.

Which is why I was surprised at the alarm in Scotland when José Manuel Barroso repeated the EU line that Scotland would have to apply for membership if it left the United Kingdom. Scotland would no longer be a member state of the EU once it became independent. Most Scots seemed to see this as a threat. That is what surprised me. It wasn’t a threat. It was an opportunity. Mr Barroso was handing the Scots a Get Out of Jail Free card.

In effect Mr Barroso was saying, though for sure this is not the way he meant it, ‘All Scots have to do to get out of the EU and away from the threat of being forced to join the single currency is to vote for independence.’

The only response in Scotland to that offer ought be, ‘How fast can we get a referendum and how fast can I tick the Independence box on the ballot?’

Yet alas freedom from the EU is not the reason Mr Salmond wants Scotland out of the UK. Quite the opposite. The SNP leader still seems to think that being a member state of the EU would be good for Scotland.

It would not.

It is not up to me to say whether Scotland would be better off inside the British Union or outside it. That is a decision for the Scots alone. But I have the experience to judge whether a small country such as an independent Scotland would be better off inside the European Union or out. It would be better off out, and not least because Scotland in the EU could not in any way be independent. It would merely be out of one union and into another: and if you don’t like being run from Westminster, you really, really aren’t going to like being run from a Berlin-dominated Brussels.

What the EU elite have planned now – at the instigation of the Germans, who say that since they are paying for the national bail-outs, they want to take charge of the national budgets - is to eliminate the last genuine independence of any of the member states.

This has already started with the member states inside the single currency.
Many nationalists seem to think it will be up to them to decide whether Scotland will go into the euro or not, so they could resist such moves against national sovereignty.

The fact is, an independent Scotland could not negotiate an opt-out from the euro. The United Kingdom was able to negotiate a permanent opt-out because it had the economic and political muscle only a big country has. Denmark was able to negotiate an opt-out because it acted at the time of the Maastricht Treaty of 1992. Danish voters rejected the treaty in a referendum. The only way the European elite could get the voters to say yes in a second vote was if they were promised, among other things, they would never be forced to join the euro. Denmark had leverage.

An independent Scotland would have no such negotiating power as the Danes and
the British had. I’ve heard Mr Barroso repeat it several times in the last few weeks: ‘The euro is the currency of the European Union.’ If a state wants in, they must commit to joining the euro. There is no room for negotiation on that.

Yet joining the euro would be disastrous for Scots. There is the whole nightmare of pension pots held in sterling, of course, and upheaval to trade with the remainder of the UK, and the loss of control over interest rates and influence over exchange rates, and being strapped into debt and deficit targets, and soon, cuts to social welfare, set by the Germans.

But there is far greater damage the euro can do, and has done, to a small EU member state.

One of the reasons given in Scotland, as in Ireland, for membership of the EU is the money handed over by various European projects. Ireland for a generation deluded itself into thinking that membership of the EU guaranteed it free money.

Then after the crash, and the debts which the EU forced onto the shoulders of the Irish people in order to pay off the German banks and others who held bonds from Irish banks, Colm McCarthy, an economist at University College Dublin, did the sums.

Here is what he found: ‘Over the entire period from 1973 to 2009, Ireland’s net receipts from the EU budget totalled about €41bn [£33bn], of which no more than about €20bn [£16bn] could be classified as in any sense discretionary. It is entirely possible, under the no-bondholder-left-behind policy, that this sum and more is being routed from Irish taxpayers to European private creditors of Irish private banks.’

In short, the small EU country most like Scotland has surrendered its sovereignty and gutted its democracy in return for a net gain of zero.

The only question is: will the Scots learn from that?

Scotland can be independent, or it can be a member of the United Kingdom, or it can be a member of the EU. Choice of one.

Share this article:

Comments

You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

Post a comment

Comments are moderated, and will not appear on this weblog until the moderator has approved them. They must not exceed 500 words. Web links cannot be accepted, and may mean your whole comment is not published.

MARY ELLEN SYNON

Mary Ellen Synon is based in Brussels as a columnist at the Irish Daily Mail and contributor to the Mail on Sunday.

At other times she has worked as: a columnist at the Irish Sunday Independent and the Sunday Business Post, Ireland correspondent and later Europe correspondent at the Economist, an associate producer at CBS News 60 Minutes based in London, and a reporter for the Daily Telegraph.

Early in her career she was awarded a travelling fellowship by the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust to allow her to study the Common Market.